Kris Kobach Is Leading the Most Insidious Dimension of Trump's Assault on Democracy

The Republican presidential tactic of crippling agencies you don't like by putting either the incompetent or the actively hostile in charge of them didn't begin in 2017. (Blessings on your memory, James Watt!) But this particular president*'s administration may be the apotheosis of the form. You have Betsy DeVos running the Department of Education and preparing to hand every schoolchild in America over to the tender mercies of Creationist cranks and the assembled tramps and thieves of the education "reform" movement. You have energy industry sublet Scott Pruitt making a dog's breakfast out of the EPA's mission.

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But the single most malevolent ethical dwarf in this incredible array of boobs and vandals may be Kris Kobach, the godfather of the national movement to suppress the votes of people the GOP would prefer not to exercise the franchise, and author of some of the most extreme anti-immigration strategies since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In Kobach's mind, of course, these go hand-in-hand in the fight against "voter fraud," which also exists largely between Kobach's ears.

Currently the Secretary of State in Kansas, Kobach would like to succeed Sam Brownback in 2018 as governor of the wreck he's made of the state in his use of it as a lab rat for every crackpot economic theory known to conservative man. At the moment, though, in an act of transparent sabotage, the president* has named Kobach as vice-chairman of his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, a snipe hunt the only apparent purpose of which is maintaining the fiction that masses of people, many of them brown, are gaming our elections. (As opposed, I guess, to the Russian ratfckers about whom the president* couldn't care less.) Vice President Mike Pence is the commission's chairman, which pretty much guarantees Kobach a free hand.

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That Kobach is helping to run what will turn out to be a monumental bag-job was illustrated quite clearly on Thursday, when Kobach wrote a letter to his fellow secretaries of state that left many jaws on the floor. From The Kansas City Star:

In a Wednesday letter, Kobach asked the Connecticut secretary of state's office to provide the commission with all publicly available voter roll data, including the full names of all registered voters along with their addresses, dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, voting history and other personal information. Kobach said in a phone call that he sent similar letters to election officials in every state and that as Kansas' top election official he will be providing the commission with all of the information for Kansas voters.

This is precisely the same as sending your bank routing and account numbers to that woman claiming to be from Nigeria who holds the deed to King Solomon's Mines. Let us look at Kobach's track record for clues, shall we? From his perch in Kansas, Kobach presides over the Interstate Crosscheck System, a fatally—and some would say, deliberately—flawed data-sharing system notable for its ability to knock eligible voters off the rolls without their knowledge.

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Moreover, last week, a federal judge whacked Kobach with a $1000 fine for making "patently misleading representations" in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU seeking information about a document Kobach is holding in a photograph taken with the president* on the occasion of his appointment to said commission. (The document is alleged to contain "adjustments" Kobach would like to make to the Motor Voter Act.) Quite simply, any secretary of state who complies with this request is either too stupid to hold the job, or is in sympathy with Kobach's goal of whitewashing the electorate. (Hi, Jay Ashcroft, SecState of Missouri!)

Alex Padilla, the Secretary of State for California, a substantial state that has been fingered by Kobach and his acolytes as Ground Zero for the mass voter-fraud that exists in their heads, can see a church by daylight and knows a hawk from a handsaw.

"California's participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the President, the Vice President, and Mr. Kobach. The President's Commission is a waste of taxpayer money and a distraction from the real threats to the integrity of our elections today: aging voting systems and documented Russian interference in our elections," Padilla said.

Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill was a bit more discreet than Padilla in her reluctance to comply. But it's clear she doesn't trust Kobach, either.

"The courts have repudiated his methods on multiple occasions but often after the damage has been done to voters," Merrill said. "Given Secretary Kobach's history we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of this commission."

As Vanita Gupta points out in that same K.C. Star report, if someone in the Obama administration had made this request, at the very least, there would be a full week of howler monkeys screaming about federalism from every perch in every conservative think-tank in the jungle. At the most, there would be hearing after hearing about the Obama administration's plan to seed thousands of the president's fellow Kenyans in every crucial precinct in Ohio and Florida. What's more important, though, is that the national campaign to roll back voting rights now has reached the highest levels of government, with the blessing of the president* and the president*-in-waiting. This is the final step backwards across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

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